Revolution IDL is a nifty new tool created by Eduardo Iturrate at ITT VIS to create object graphics scenes. It can place text, images, various kinds of plots and polygons, and object graphics entities like clipping planes and lights into a scene. You can be translate, scale, and rotate all the objects in the scene as well as change their properties.
What makes this a great tool for learning object graphics is that it reverses the normal workflow from code to visualization. Revolution IDL can support a workflow where you:
- use a visual interface to create the scene
- display and edit the object graphics tree and the properties of the selected object, and
- export the scene to IDL code that makes the scene.
The code exported is then an automated script to make the same visualization. From there it can then be modified to get the real data, produce a different kind of ouput, and/or be inserted into your system where it is needed. It would be nice if the iTools could do things like this, but until then Revolution IDL can get you started.
March 19th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
This program is great for both beginners and advanced users of IDL Object Graphics.
The automatically generated code is both instructive to the inexperienced users and can help advanced users speed up their development.
Great Job Eduardo!!
October 18th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
[…] demoed a cool tool that I’ve mentioned here before. This really came alive with Eduardo behind the controls. I think this has a lot of potential, […]